产品中心

By MICHAEL CROSS in TOKYO BRITAIN’s Cavendish Laboratory, where Sir Ernest Rutherford worked, is about to welcome a new tenant: a Japanese engineering and electronics company. Hitachi, the world’s third largest manufacturer of semiconductors, last week announced plans to open a laboratory at the Cavendish in Cambridge, to work on ‘futuristic concepts’ for electronics. The company also said that it would set up a group at Trinity College, Dublin, to study artificial intelligence and software for supercomputers. The announcements mark a wave of investment by Japanese companies in research overseas. Yasutsugu Takeda, director of Hitachi’s Central Research Laboratory in Tokyo, said that the new laboratories, which will each employ about 10 people at first, would form part of an expanding chain of research centres in Europe, the US and the rest of the world. At least two other Japanese companies have opened research centres in Britain over the past year. In October, 1988, Kobe Steel opened a laboratory at Surrey Research Park, near Guildford, to study new materials such as polymers and composites. Surrey is also the home of a group developing computer software for Canon. Hitachi’s announcement coincided with decisions by two of Japan’s largest companies, Toyota and Fujitsu, to open factories in Britain. The companies are Japan’s largest makers of cars and computers, respectively. Toyota’s factory will employ about 3000 people when it begins making cars in 1992. However, the company has not yet decided whether it will make engines at the site or merely assemble components. This is the crux of the argument over whether products from the new Japanese-owned factories in Europe should be taxed as imports. Fujitsu’s factory will produce microchips. Production will start by the end of 1990 on devices ranging from so-called custom chips, designed for special purposes, to mass-produced memory chips. Almost 100 Japanese companies have opened factories in Britain since 1971, most of them in the past two years. The companies want a manufacturing base in Europe to protect them from possible barriers to imports. They choose Britain because of the English language and the government’s encouragement of foreign manufacturers. Britain now accounts for nearly one-quarter of Japan’s manufacturing investment in Europe. A survey of Japanese executives, which the newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun carried out last year, ranked Britain as the favourite site in Europe for a manufacturing plant, with West Germany second and Spain third. However, West Germany was easily the favourite place for setting up a research laboratory and European headquarters. Concern is already emerging about the sophistication of technology that Japanese companies are transferring to Britain. The European Commission is investigating so-called ‘screwdriver plants’ to see if they do any real manufacturing or whether they merely assemble kits of components. British diplomats in Tokyo point out that the research that Japanese companies want to do in Britain usually has nothing to do with any manufacturing they do there. Hitachi, for example, assembles home electronics products in Wales. Neither Canon nor Kobe Steel manufactures anything in Britain, although Canon is considering investing in a plant to make office equipment. According to some observers,